Just one year ago, the idea for this exhibition seemed both bold and unsettling. Delving into the world of artificial intelligence to explore its intersections with photography—a discipline we have championed for nine years at Hangar—could have been seen as a rupture, even a betrayal. However, it was a necessity, almost a mission: to meet the challenge of a dialogue between tradition and innovation, and to explore the future of the image.

To build this project, we adopted a hybrid methodology: an international call for projects, allowing fresh ideas to reach us, combined with a rigorous selection of works discovered during our research. We quickly chose a structuring theme: revisiting historical events or figures through the lens of artificial intelligence. This framework allowed us to avoid purely aesthetic abstraction and focus the reflection on the dialogue between the past and the future.

Supported by experts in photography and image, the Hangar curation team approached this selection with increasing confidence. The chosen artists stand out for their deep reflection on their practice, reinterpreted in light of this new tool, regardless of their generation. These works do not merely present photorealistic images: they embody a new visual category yet to be named, a new generation of creation that could be called, why not, promptography.

With this exhibition, Hangar reaffirms its identity: an art center resolutely focused on photography and image, but also firmly rooted in the heart of contemporary art history’s transformations.

Welcome to a journey between the real and the virtual, the past and the future, where imagination is written at the intersection of humanity and machine.

- Delphine Dumont, director of Hangar